The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Granada Nights
    a hackneyed story of a tedious, lovelorn expatriate, pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.
  2. Vedette
    Vedette joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories.
  3. Wedding Season
    Wedding Season is mostly flavorless, but its interest in capitalistic success inspires a pucker of bad taste.
  4. Look Both Ways
    Never mind that Look Both Ways seems to posit that, for women, child rearing and a career are in relative opposition — when Natalie comes to a fork in the road, the movie hardly lets her look both ways. It bulldozes her down one path, and then the other.
  5. Art of Love
    It’s a tired and male-serving narrative one wishes might be retired.
  6. Captain America: Brave New World
    The writing is stiff and the ensemble is mostly charmless, while the visuals are slapdash.
  7. The Immaculate Room
    The film focuses more on one character’s moral defects than the sketchy project overall, leading to a conclusion that feels unsatisfying at best and pompous at worst.
  8. If Lucy Fell
    There was more Allenesque potential in (Schaeffer's) earlier ``My Life's in Turnaround'' (directed with Donal Lardner Ward) than there is in this painfully cute concoction, which is about two old friends with a pact to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. There are too many occasions when the viewer may wish they would just go ahead and jump.
  9. The Island of Dr. Moreau
    Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane.
  10. Shalom Taiwan
    It’s hard to argue with that message, but one doesn’t have to accept the ho-hum experience of watching this movie.
  11. The Substitute
    The movie's mentality is su'med up in one cutaway shot. A split second before a man's face is about to be shoved into a boat propeller, the movie flashes to another man pushing half an orange onto the head of a squeezer.
  12. Two If by Sea
    How bad could it be? Not exactly awful. But not funny, sexy or romantic either, which doesn't leave anything for this inert and oddly confused movie to do.
  13. Meet Cute
    Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny.
  14. Rosaline
    The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.
  15. Delia's Gone
    One watches this movie with a persistent “this is just … wrong” feeling. It’s not just the superficial depiction of Louis’s condition, or the facile depiction of racial dynamics, although those factors don’t help. Maybe it’s the pervasive self-seriousness in pursuit of what turns out to be nothing much at all.
  16. The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales
    The centering of Abigail Disney’s voice — we also see her tweets calling out the outrageous salaries of Disney executives — makes the documentary a kind of personal reckoning and an attempt to get through to other wealthy individuals, though one wonders how a film that doubles as a “Capitalism for Dummies” video would make an impact. Instead, the documentary wants, above all, to make sure we know how one particular Disney feels.
  17. A Christmas Story Christmas
    Mostly it made me want to watch the original, which, as always, remains well worth revisiting.
  18. Adieu Godard
    It’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies.
  19. The Bengali
    Despite an intriguing premise, what Kaul actually wants to say here is in need of a lot more fleshing out.
  20. The Little Mermaid
    The new, live-action The Little Mermaid is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Prisoner's Daughter
    Several moments within the director Catherine Hardwicke’s latest film Prisoner’s Daughter contain glimmers of promise, each one regrettably smothered by a pedestrian script from Mark Bacci.
  22. Pretty Problems
    An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.
  23. Spirited
    The combination of this fine-tuned spectacle with the ineffectual vocals of the main duo — and distractingly uncanny visuals and special effects — transforms Spirited into a disjointed movie musical with all the superficial trappings of a Broadway flop.
  24. Your Place or Mine
    No one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.
  25. Rhinegold
    Mixing war movie, coming-of-age drama and gangster thriller, Akin and Hajabi’s screenplay is a dispiriting brew of repellent behavior and odious rap lyrics.
  26. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
    It’s the sort of bland, innocuous trifle that will swiftly recede into the oblivion of a streaming service menu — a comedy without laughs and a family movie without heart, lacking any of the wit or charm of Kinney’s original stories.
  27. Voodoo Macbeth
    With such a gross misinterpretation of the source material (why invent Welles onstage in blackface?) it’s fitting that the most engaging part of “Voodoo Macbeth” turns out to be the archival footage of the real-life production that plays alongside the credits.
  28. A Chance Encounter
    After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language.
  29. The Lair
    Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006).
  30. The First Noelle
    It’s hard to become immersed in this aspirational alternate reality because of the movie’s pun-filled and often unbelievable dialogue, as well as lackluster performances delivered by the lead actors.
  31. The Apology
    A play-like trudge through seesawing power dynamics, bursts of violence, perpetual gloom and a ludicrously attenuated finale, The Apology could have doubled its tension by halving its running time.
  32. They All Laughed
    It's aggressive in its ineptitude. It grates on the nerves like a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm.
  33. Chained Heat
    The combination of the graphic if meaningless title, Miss Blair and the incomparably funny Miss Stevens is almost irresistible. I should have resisted more. [05 Jun 1983, p.19]
    • The New York Times
  34. Maybe I Do
    A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com Maybe I Do was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.
  35. Life Upside Down
    It’s a shallow look at shallow people.
  36. Boston Strangler
    Washed in an unappetizing sludge of grayish green, the movie aims for serious and settles on bilious. The real McLaughlin was a fascinating, pioneering newshound; you’re unlikely to find her here.
  37. In from the Side
    Though Carter is competent at making the chaos of a rainy match or the ecstasy of a clandestine tryst watchable, his characters feel like sketches with barely any idiosyncrasies. What’s the point of watching the game if you don’t care about the players?
  38. The Wandering Earth II
    Losing all of the glee of its predecessor, the movie instead offers nearly three hours of convoluted story lines, undercooked themes and a tangle of confused, glaringly state-approved political subtext.
  39. The Locksmith
    Most of the movie is told with big, rudimentary handwriting and slathered in clichés.
  40. Body Parts
    Ironically, the film mirrors the callow cinematic dynamics it critiques: It titillates, even as it scolds.
  41. White Men Can't Jump
    This version has little quirk and less spark.
  42. Strays
    Over the next 90-plus minutes, the canines drop as many F-bombs as Pacino did in “Scarface.” Then there are the scatological jokes, each one more outlandish than the last, none bearing the slightest tinge of wit or joy.
  43. A Little White Lie
    Hobbled by a lack of visual oomph or verbal sparkle, A Little White Lie pokes feebly at impostor syndrome and writerly insecurity.
  44. One True Loves
    Basic storytelling components are also ignored, as if entire scenes are missing, so that One True Loves, directed by Andy Fickman, stumbles even as a piece of Hallmark sappiness.
  45. Last Night in New York
    The movie can’t help but function as an apologia for the ruling class.
  46. Unlocked
    In a cinematic landscape where the anxiety of surveillance has been sufficiently explored — with movies like “The Conversation,” “Enemy of the State” and “Kimi” — this simplistically dreary offering doesn’t crack a new code.
  47. Kandahar
    Stupefyingly sluggish.
  48. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.
  49. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    Boutella is a pleasingly game and lithesome heroine, but the movie around her feels curiously indifferent, a crammed, compressed delivery system for its maker’s dorm-room dreams.
  50. Lift
    Hart possesses neither the charisma of Cruise nor the charm of Redford necessary to shoulder these action movie mechanics, a failure that demonstrates what happens when character actors are told they’re movie stars.
  51. A Tourist's Guide to Love
    A rom-com that so scrupulously fulfills every cliché of the genre, it might as well have been devised by ChatGPT.
  52. The Machine
    Even when the relentlessly salty humor gets fully crass (a dog is thrown out a high window), the product is bland.
  53. Ithaka
    The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Cassandra Crossing
    The plague germs rapidly mutate into something harmless, like a cold. The film never mutates: It just goes on, becoming more and more lethal.
  55. Living with Chucky
    With an influential history to mine, it’s a shame the franchise-spanning documentary Living With Chucky, written and directed by Kyra Elise Gardner, feels like hagiographic DVD featurettes meanderingly stitched together.
  56. Fool's Paradise
    There’s something grudgingly admirable about the voluble star essentially spending an entire film doing reactions. But it’s a disastrous move in a Hollywood satire that already needs to be more than a grab bag of jokes.
  57. House of Wax
    The major causes for anxiety presented by this film are in the savagery of its conception and the intolerable artlessness of its sound. It is thrown and howled at the audience as though the only purpose was to overwhelm the naturally curious patron with an excess of brutal stimuli.
  58. Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story
    What the directors Gary Smart and Christopher Griffiths made is a documentary in spirit. But it’s really more of an annotated oral history of Englund’s entire, extensive IMDb page — almost film by film, in chronological order, for more than two hours. It’s exhausting.
  59. Maggie Moore(s)
    Top-heavy with big names (Tina Fey, Jon Hamm) and set in a nondescript small town populated primarily by sad sacks and losers, the movie struggles to get out of second gear.
  60. Padre Pio
    LaBeouf essays a rather, let’s say, contemporary Pio. And completely sinks the picture.
  61. The Beanie Bubble
    In any given moment, the movie is either overstating the importance of its subject or trivializing it.
  62. The YouTube Effect
    The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused.
  63. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me
    The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.
  64. Jeanne du Barry
    Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”
  65. The Good Half
    Snow, as the daughter who always played second fiddle, brings real feeling to her role — suggesting that she may in fact be the good half of this insipid drama.
  66. Gray Matter
    It’s not so much that Gray Matter is formula, but that it is clumsily made formula. Except, that is, for Isaac’s performance.
  67. God Is a Bullet
    The misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.
  68. Sound of Freedom
    It’s hard to tell if this movie avoids any conventionally exciting set pieces out of scrupulousness or just lack of inspiration. Oddly, the picture’s muted tone ultimately undercuts its solemn sense of mission.
  69. The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland
    What's the differences between the Care Bears television show on Saturday morning and The Care Bears' Adventure in Wonderland...? The movie is longer, and you will have to pay money to see it - about as much as it appears the producers spent to make it.
  70. Fear the Night
    As for LaBute, a once incisive chronicler of male cruelty and ineptitude, his continued dabblings in genre are lamentable. Perhaps the kindest thing to do is pretend this dud never happened.
  71. He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword
    The Secret of the Sword is a Saturday morning kiddie cartoon stretched out to feature length, which by some lights is an awfully long time.
  72. The Underdoggs
    The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.
  73. Saltburn
    Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.
  74. Unsung Hero
    Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash.
  75. Roller Boogie
    103 minutes is an awfully long time to watch people whiz along the boardwalk. The novelty wears off in a hurry.
  76. Rebel
    At best, this drama picks apart the Islamic State’s nefarious recruitment tactics, taking on the fresh perspective of a Muslim family in Europe. These dynamics are rich, and the consequences agonizing — so it’s too bad the filmmakers seem to think that the bigger the spectacle, the more powerfully communicated this whirlwind of politics and emotions. The opposite is the case.
  77. My Neighbor Adolf
    While the lead actors are clearly committed, the movie gives them little to do besides exchange verbal invective.
  78. Choose Love
    Predictability aside, Choose Love resembles less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a series of disconnected, shallow interactions, each leading to a different predetermined cliché.
  79. Portrait of the Queen
    Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.
  80. Cabrini
    It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.
  81. Boy Kills World
    The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.
  82. Journey to Bethlehem
    The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.
  83. Divinity
    A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.
  84. High & Low: John Galliano
    The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.
  85. After Death
    Whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.
  86. The Devil on Trial
    Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.
  87. Family Switch
    The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.
  88. Genie
    The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.
  89. Miller's Girl
    A work of glaring artifice, Miller’s Girl, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate.
  90. He Went That Way
    Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.
  91. Spaceman
    Spaceman is neither particularly astute about human nature nor discernibly interested in the politics embedded in it, and it is not even meme-ably bad, which is a shame. So much wasted potential.
  92. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.
  93. The Strangers: Chapter 2
    With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.
  94. Joker: Folie à Deux
    Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.
  95. It's What's Inside
    Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.
  96. Mother of the Bride
    Mother of the Bride is directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”) with an apparent allergy to verisimilitude.
  97. The Union
    The gimmick is that The Union, in addition to being an action film, is also a sort of comedy of remarriage for Roxanne and Mike, except that the screenwriters, Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, haven’t brought much in the way of levity to the relationship. Nor have they applied much ingenuity to the big set pieces.
  98. Incoming
    Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.
  99. Lonely Planet
    For this to work, the relationship needs a certain element of inevitability and comfort. Theirs is stilted.
  100. Meet Me Next Christmas
    In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.
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